Long story short: I ain't buyin' the book. The philosophical tradition from which he writes came out of the discussion seeming bloodless and loveless.Simon started portentously: ancient philosophy began with wonder, my philosophy begins with disappointment. Religious disappointment ("God is dead") and political disappointment (the failure of left ideals). The options before us seem to be varieties of "passive and active nihilism": "military neoliberalism" (the US status quo), "neo-leninism" (terrorist attempts to upset the world order) and - his preference - "neo-anarchism," a chastened refusal to be coopted by the state while still working within it, hoping that spontaneous groups will come together into a popular front. What's to motivate this unpromising movement (Simon thinks the neoliberals will win; the system's designed to maintain perpetual disappointment) is a sense of the "infinite demand" of ethics and the habit of laughing at ourselves emerging from having learned from Socrates and Montaigne how to die.
Cornel was flattering about "brother Simon" with whom he shares a deep concern for the pervasive nihilism of modern life, but Simon's proposal vanished like a soap bubble as soon as Cornel called him on starting with disappointment. That's a Romantic thing, said Cornel, deftly contextualizing it in late German idealism. As an African-American he doesn't expect the world to make sense, and so he isn't disappointed when it doesn't. Sad, yes, and angry. But not disappointed. Ethics and politics shouldn't be based in mourning for something which may never have existed, and is better built on the experience of love of the least of these.
I can't do justice to the discussion but by the end of it I was persuaded that Simon's approach, and the post-post-modern philosophy from which he draws his inspiration, has lost all contact with the world. The best response to his view came in the answer a school teacher in the audience offered to a question from another school teacher which Simon had not taken seriously. The question was: what do you teach young people when you are yourself heart-broken over human prospects (my paraphrase)? Simon had answered "tell them the truth, or they'll find you out" and moved on. The second teacher - he teaches elementary school - spoke of how students and teacher find and learn hope in each other, in the very process of learning together. As he spoke I could just feel the love which informs and is enriched by his teaching - the love Cornel had spoken of - and could sense nothing remotely like it in Simon's chilly sophistries.
